Apple centralised much of its UK staff and operations into an enormous 500,000-square-foot, six-storey space within a restored 1930s power station in central London’s Battersea about a year ago.
Rather than an in-person presentation at its headquarters in Cupertino, California, new iPads were revealed in London via a prerecorded address streamed worldwide, including other press at events across North America, Europe and Asia. Although nobody at Apple would be caught openly speculating about unannounced devices, one has to assume the M4 isn’t purely a one-and-done that will appear only in this iPad. For starters, the M4 carries not only the requisite leaps in efficiency and a new display engine built to drive the iPad but also a phenomenally improved neural capability to power artificial intelligence processes.
However, the wider tech industry is more interested in generative text, code writing, and multimodal chatbots—a pool into which Apple has yet to jump. A powerful AI chip that lets you run privately on-device without resorting to cloud computing could make for a good springboard. With quality colour reproduction and consistency, all the power needed to run high-end visual modelling or AI tasks, and access to the App Store for any number of editing or creation suites, it’s not a straight-up replacement for a laptop but an alternative to one in certain workflows.Apple doesn’t see it as merely a tool for artists and architects but also for Hollywood film production, industrial design, and even medical use.